Artist Research Paper

Henri Cartier-Bresson


Although I had not heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson before conducting my research I now consider him one of my primary influences, as his work in photography has shaped what I see in the world of images today. Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908, and grew up in a time where photography was mainly used to shoot meticulously arranged shots of family portraits and important figures. Cartier-Bresson revolutionized photography by taking shots of “the decisive moment”, known today as candid shots. Cartier-Bresson grew up in Chanteloupe, France in a middle class family. He went to art lessons in his youth, which yielded his sense of composition noted in his photographs. As a boy he owned a Brownie Box, which was a small inexpensive camera of the time that he used to take pictures of the family on holidays. It was not until the age of 22, however, that Cartier-Bresson truly fell in love with photography. After spending time in the African-Bush he caught backwater fever and returned to France to recover, it was then that he first picked up a Leica. When first shooting pictures with it in the town he exclaimed, “[I] prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve life in the act of living." With this Cartier-Bresson undertook a lifelong journey in which he worked to capture the essence of real life, and use the camera as an “extension of the eye”. This way of viewing the camera, I have noticed, is much the way I do. In terms of candids, motion and the social role of photography I look up to Cartier-Bresson and his work and see his influences within my own work.

In my work I have, like Cartier-Bresson, tried to capture the candid moments. Cartier-Bresson describes taking such photographs as capturing “the decisive moment”, and in other terms capturing an event at the exact moment that it happens. Cartier-Bresson was much criticized for his work. Many considered him a mere snapper of pictures, giving little thought into his artistic creations. Cartier-Bresson argued his cause with statements that revealed what work went into timing, and quick set up of a picture to be able to gain a pleasurable composition. For example, in describing “The decisive moment” Cartier-Bresson stated, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” In our time, this form of photography has become accepted and widely used in the art world. In my photographs and even video, I have also tried to capture that “decisive moment”. For example, in many of my shots of leaves blowing in the wind, I had to be able to snap or record at the exact moment a leaf was blowing in a way that I found distinctive of that leaf. To be able to capture good shots, with the desired effects, and also have a desirable composition is no easy feat. Capturing movement in particular is very difficult.





The motion that Cartier-Bresson was able to capture in his photographs is amazing. In one of his pieces, of which I cannot find any title, he has three naked children running into the ocean. Their arms are caught in crazy flung up positions, and one child is caught in mid-stride. He is landing on his right foot, with his left outstretched back flying through the air. Although now a days we have seen many look a likes of this photograph, Cartier-Bresson was the first to seriously explore this way of capturing motion in photography and he was the first to write about his work in great length and detail. In another photograph of his you see the comical site of a man in the air, who has merely stepped of a wooden structure and is now about to fall into a huge lake-like puddle. It’s as if the man did not see the puddle and kept walking. The motion of the man is exquisite, he is caught in the air, one foot forward and the other just launched off from the wood. He leans forward as if in a brisk pace, and his arms are outstretched front and back for balance. In my own work, such as the pieces used in my photomontage, I also tried to capture movement. I went about my work much the same that Cartier-Bresson did, I watched my subject, Pia, walk with an umbrella and chose shots of her that were compositionally interesting. In an effort to capture movement over time, I took several shots of Pia and aligned them together. In this way, I took movement a step up. Viewers were able to recognize in some sense the length of Pia’s walk, and not only that fact that she had been walking. In hindsight, I wish I had been able to research this artist before my project so that I could have gained ideas and technique from his work.


What Cartier-Bresson did that I really respect him for was to recognize the social role of photography so as to stimulate certain feelings among the public or express certain ideas. Cartier-Bresson is described as having looked at the world and allowing us to see it through his thought in his photographs. Many show certain ideas such as loneliness, or address political issues. “As a journalist, Henri Cattier-Bresson felt an intense need to communicate what he thought and felt about what he saw, and while his pictures often were subtle they were rarely obscure.” (Henri Cartier-Bresson). When I am photographing, I also, try to portray events how I see them and feel about them. In the Time Arts photo montage project in particular, I arranged the many photos in a particular, well thought, arrangement so as the viewer would come to a certain realization by the end of the line of pictures. I began with images of religious items, a rosary and a rosary book in particular. Then I showed images of a person holding the items and praying. I showed the same person going to the mall later that day. Then I showed flashy images of the many materials and manufactured objects at the mall. In the end I brought it back to the person praying and solidified my idea through the text “What is real” “What is real when the lights go dark and the hands no longer touch”. In this I was expressing the need for people to address this issue and decide what is real in our lives. Is it merely what exists on this earth and the things you can touch, or is it that what is real is what will exist even after you have passed on? I look to Cartier-Bresson’s powerful images that have been able to relate messages in one shot. I took a series to convey meaning. To be able to well convey a particular thought in one shot is remarkable, and Cartier-Bresson is acclaimed for this.

In conclusion, Cartier-Bresson has had major influences on my work although I was unaware. Cartier-Bresson was the founder of the candid shot with a camera, capturing motion and feeling simultaneously. I will continue to reference his work as I now recognize him and his importance in the art world and find his work truly inspirational.

Pictures found on Google http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en&q=Cartier+Bresson+portrait&btnG=Search

Final Project

Visit http://e_brubakerportfolio.blogspot.com. This blog can also be accessed by clicking on "View my entire portfolio" on the right.


In our final assignment we had the choice of working in the style of any project we had done the whole semester. This included photomontages, soundscapes, blogs, scratch films, and videos.

I chose to create another blog page. On our original blog page we had included all of the work from our Time Arts class that semester, with an essay describing the process, goals, and meaning in each piece. On my new blog page I wanted to include all the work from my other art classes, and high school work that was included in my college portfolio. As I have a bulk of work, an essay describing each piece would not be appropriate. Thus, I decided that little blurbs that either described process or meaning in about 4-5 sentences would be better. Some work, such as figure studies and still lifes, did not even need an explanation.

Creating the blogpage was not especially difficult, it was simply time consuming. First I had to photograph all of my work. Over thanksgiving break I was able to photograph all of my high school work that I wanted to include. I took the pictures around noon so that natural light could be used instead of the flash of my camera. The images were therefore closer to the actual color of the artwork. Although I do not own a professional camera, it is a simple Samsung s500 digital camera that only cost $170, I was very happy with the way the images turned out. The artwork that did not photograph well were those that were in plastic sheaths. The light made reflections on the plastic that took away from the work. In the future, I will take the artwork out of the plastic sheaths to photograph them. In all photographing the work probably took me 4.5-6 hours.

The next step was to upload the images onto the blog page. This was a little difficult because when you upload the images they are shown in text format as a series of letters and symbols. If I wanted to organize the artwork in a particular order, or add a blurb of text, I could not tell which pieces were which. I ended up having to “View my Blog” and then write down on a piece of paper what order the images showed up in. I could then go back to editing and arrange them as I desired. For example, I would write that “Duck” was third from the top on the blog page. Once in editing, I would cut the text and symbol combination that was third from the top and place it where I wanted. This in particular, made the process of creating the blogpage very time consuming.

What I really enjoyed was being able to show my process through a series of photos on the blogpage. For example, in my 2d foundations class I created an image that was representative of a newspaper article. Creating the final image was the result of many steps. I first found an image of an Asian mask in a book at the library, I included this image on the blogpage. The next step was scanning this image into the computer while moving it around which produced really interesting distortions. On the blogpage I showed some of the examples of distortions that could be created this way. Then next step I showed was using a plastic bag filled with water, shaken up to have many bubbles, and placing on top of a distorted image. The result was a person that looked under water. This as I explained was the process that created the final image (seen first at the top of the blogpage). The process of how an artist creates their work is always very interesting, and although many artists like to keep their process secret, I enjoyed writing about how I created such an image without a computer program such as Photoshop. Showing the process also clues a viewer into how long one single piece of artwork can take, which people other than artists do not always realize.

Creating a blogpage of all of my artwork made me very proud. It is a relief that I can have all of it up on a webpage for many reasons. To begin, its great to have photographs of all of my work, now even if the original work gets damaged or lost I have a picture of it. Second, its so convenient to have all of my work in one place and on the Internet, this makes my work accessible to whoever I choose. For job purposes and simply showing an interested person my work, this blogpage will be great.

Assignment 4

The Assignment: Create a movie using iMovie that has audio included in it.

With such a broad assignment it was hard to know where to begin. We made lists of what we were passionate about, or what we wanted to learn more about in class. A movie driven from passion is more entertaining, as the viewer can sense the interest of the maker. When the maker is passionate about what they create, the time and effort filming and editing are less likely to get frustrating. However, in class I did not seem to come up with “the idea” that was bound to work. I am passionate about many things, but most I would not be able to film. For instance, I am very passionate about saving the whales, especially those who are endangered, from the pacific fishers that continuously hunt them illegally. Obviously, I would not be able to gain my own footage pertaining to this issue. I am also very passionate about the people in this world who love me and care for me, this is my family, my amazing boyfriend, my high school group of girl friends, and also although not a person my golden retriever. However, all of these people live five hours away and so creating a movie that incorporated them was impossible.

After much time pondering I came to the conclusion that I wanted to create a movie with a simple topic so that I would be able to spend many hours editing and creating a soundtrack, not just gathering footage. Creating a soundtrack was of particular interest to me, because this was our first opportunity to use music in our movies. We could not use others music, but we could create our own if we knew how to play an instrument or use a program such as garageband on the computer. I did not know how to use garageband at the time and was excited to find out how it worked; since I own a MacBook the program came with my computer.

The idea for my topic was one that I thought of on a walk through the cemetery on a beautiful fall day. I have always enjoyed the beauty of nature, and on the walk my breath was taken away by the tossing orange, and yellow leaves. As I observed, the different kinds of leaves had different personalities as they reacted differently with the wind. The skinny leaves twittered frantically, while the maple leaves slowly waved. The trees themselves, would shake and sway left to right, they looked as though they were strong sentinels waltzing. As I watched, I realized that focusing on the beauty in the movement of leaves would be a great subject for my movie. So captivated was I by their movement that for that reason alone I wished to document it. I would then be able to relive this gorgeous fall day again.

As the topic was extremely simple, the soundtrack became an important element in keeping viewers attention. In the graveyard, it was not only the sight of the leaves but the wind in your hair and the crisp smell of cold decaying leaves that gave the experience. Without such elements that created the experience, the soundtrack became the substitute. Music, as many are aware, is able to express a mood and give a listener sensations that are unattainable through visuals. Using garageband I worked to create a background score that mimicked the wind, and different sounds the leaves created in their motion. I ended up creating three different musical sections, they were interpretive of different wind speeds that caused different sounds and feelings to arise from the leaves. The three sections also thwarted redundancy in the soundtrack, thus keeping viewer attention.

Using iMovie, I brought in my clips and was upset to see that the saturation of color on the video camera did not transfer over to the computer. Compared to the camera and real life, the leaves looked dull once transferred to the computer. I never found a way to fix this issue but in the future I hope to be able to adjust this so that my movie more realistically shows the magnificent color that the leaves were.

Sequencing of images was extremely difficult, since the images changed to the beat of the music. I had to first import the soundtrack into iMovie and then find where each beat happened with the playhead to determine where images would change. The sequences of the first section were wider shots of many trees and their beauty as a culmination, spreading across the hills in a fire of red and oranges. These clips were longer since I used panning, and wanted to capture the grand scale, spacious feeling that is not evident with shorter clips. The second sequence had shorter shots of the leaves close up. In this section I was focusing on the energy of the leaves in strong wind. Since their movements were quick and jittery, short clips were effective. In the third sequence, I still showed leaves and trees close up, but the clips were longer since these were shots of leaves in a slow breeze.

I was very pleased with how the movie turned out. Looking back, the choice to have a simple topic was wise. We had limited time to work and that decision gave me the freedom to spend a lot of time bringing everything together in the movie. Transitions, timing, sequencing, and the soundtrack were all done with precision, which produced a successful movie.

Assignment 3

In this assignment we were to create film without the use of a camera. Using 16mm black film we were to scratch, paint and bleach the film to create a projectable movie. This type of film production is called homemade film, scratch film, camera less film, or direct film. The worked film had to be 50-60 feet long with 3-5 feet of black on both ends.

Having missed class the day we received our film, I went to our Lab room to get a roll. The 16mm film as I found had two sides. One side was shiny and plastic, known as the base. The other side felt chalky. This was the workable side with the black emulsion on it. Emulsion is made up of silver compounds and silver halides in gelatin. These are extremely light sensitive, allowing pictures to be produced on them through the use of a camera. The film we used was already exposed before it was used and therefore was completely black.

The roll of film we received was very long and a wave of apprehension set on me since I initially thought the whole roll (about 2 inches thick!) was 60 ft of film. As it turned out, there was much more than 60 ft of film on the roll. This was relief, however, working just 50 ft of film was extremely difficult. The emulsion was not so easily removable as I anticipated. This is because the emulsion is secured to the base with a very strong substratum (cellulose triacetate). When I tried scratching the emulsion off with a quarter it would not come off. Then I tried using the edge of nail clippers, which had no success as well. First of all the nail clippers were difficult to hold and maneuver because of their small size and also the sharp edge of the clippers could not reach the film because of its angle. Next I decided to try an x-acto knife. The x-acto knife actually worked very well, but I had to be careful because if you put just a little to much pressure with it you would bust a hole in the film. What became really exciting for me was when I visited my boyfriend’s house and got to experiment with all of his Dad’s hardware tools. Most of the tools would not scratch the emulsion off either! However, I found a great rusty screwdriver that worked great in making tiny random scratches. It gave great texture since it created both dots and scratches when run back and forth over the film. When creating the film I tried to keep in mind how it would look running through a projector. For this reason I treated the textures like a story line where thin wavy lines would gradually develop into an angry mass of cross hatched line work that would then fade into dots and back to wavy lines. It quickly became the rise and fall of line aggression. Since I could not very well vary the thickness of my scratches, the density and direction of the scratches was the only way to create differences.

The idea of using color really excited me. I thought that in order for the color to truly be seen that I would have to take off a large portion of emulsion. This would be a very tedious job if I were scratching off the emulsion with my x-acto knife so I decided to try bleach, which is supposed to take the emulsion off quite easily. As it turns out, this emulsion just does not want to come off, with a lot of rubbing and pressure however the emulsion would come off with bleach on a cotton ball or Q tip. Using the Q-tip I created many circles with no emulsion. I created these circles for close to ten feet because I thought their movement through the projector, which would probably look like flashing, would be very interesting. This was very time consuming since the emulsion was hard to remove. I worked 3 hours with the bleach. Even though I had the bottle closed and was working from a small Petri dish filled with bleach, I began to feel sick by the end. It became hard to breath and my throat was burning. In one of the more embarrassing events of my life I had to be rushed to the hospital. Such inhalation of bleach is apparently extremely unhealthy and can give you permanent lung damage. Nearly 12 medics came to help me from the dorm, and everyone came out of their dorm rooms to see what was going on. Of course, with everyone peering out I was taken out of my dorm on a stretcher (as is procedure) with oxygen tubes sticking out of my nose to help me breathe. I was wheeled down to the ambulance and taken to the hospital where they checked for fluid in the lungs. To end this tangent, I was discharged from the hospital at 1:30 AM and fortunately did not have any long-term lung damage from the bleach exposure. I do want everyone reading to know, however, that it was very painful experience and that you should not be around bleach for prolonged time periods like myself. Masks are a good idea.

After this trip to the hospital I was unwilling to use anymore bleach in my project but I already had enough areas without emulsion to be able to use paint. I debated which type of paint to use, watercolor which is see through, acrylic which dries quickly or sharpies which works very well but has limited (and for what I was imagining, undesirable) colors. I decided to try acrylic since I find the colors in the paint set I own to be absolutely gorgeous. I was not sure if acrylic would not be transparent enough and I was afraid that it would not show though the projector. For that reason I chose the more staining colors, pthallo green and magenta which are more transparent. I also ended up using some dark blue that I added to the green and magenta to gain a range in values.

I used the color on the circles and also some of the larger scratched out areas. I was dismayed when my work went through the projector because the colors were barely visible. I could have gone much thicker with my application of the paint. Other students in the class who did so ended up with really intense, vibrant colors on the screen. I think it would be worthy of experimentation; to find how thick the paint can be applied before it is no longer projectable.

Overall this project was very tedious, the scratching, bleaching, layering of texture, fade in and out of each texture, use of many tools, and painting took many laborious hours. And even with 50 feet of film created, when projected this lasts no longer than a minute! Completing this project has really allowed me to appreciate the video camera.